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Several panelists at the Cloud Executive Summit spoke out against the push around multi-cloud
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Though there are some valid uses for multi-cloud deployments, most enterprises don't actually need to go this route
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The decision whether or not to go multi-cloud should be tied to specific business outcomes rather than done just for the sake of it, the panelists concluded
When it comes to multi-cloud, Red Hat and VMware are some of the biggest names out there. In fact, when VMware closed its spin off from Dell back in 2021, VMware set its sights almost solely on addressing the burgeoning multi-cloud market. These days, it’s hard to have a conversation about the cloud without talking about the Red Hat’s OpenShift platform or the VMware’s Tanzu offering. But according to the panelists at the Cloud Executive Summit, the multi-cloud products from these companies are solutions in search of a problem.
“What is the real business benefit that you’re getting” from multi-cloud, Orbital Sidekick Principal Software Engineer Andrew Guenther asked at the Summit.
“You see companies that had a lot of dominance in a pre-cloud world who are now seeing their opportunity since they missed the boat. You’re seeing ‘Ah, we can sell a product on top of cloud now. We can be relevant again,’” he added.
To be clear, Red Hat and VMware’s solutions do work for those who need to connect multiple cloud environments. So, no, they're not snake oil in that sense. The catch is that, according to the panelists, most users don’t really need more than one cloud.
That idea flies in the face of recent research from Oracle that claimed 98% of enterprises are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy. The most common drivers for doing so were cited as data sovereignty requirements (41%) and cost optimization (40%).
But as Guenther put it: “You had a cloud that was working perfectly fine for you whatever provider it was, but ‘you need multi-cloud, friend.’ Why? Do you actually see any of these promises specifically around cloud agnosticism really shake out for anybody meaningfully?”
Guenther wasn’t alone. Build-a-Bear CTO Dara Meath noted her company has decided to pursue a single cloud approach with Azure in its transformation journey in part because of limited worker skill sets. Elsewhere, panelists speaking during a security discussion noted adding more clouds means adding complexity, and more complexity is bad when it comes to locking down your environment.
To some extent, Red Hat, VMware, Aviatrix, Prosimo and the like have been trying to solve for complexity by creating abstraction layers that give end-users a single set of controls that span across their cloud environments. But Guenther noted that by boiling things down to the least common denominator these tools remove some of the value-added differentiators each cloud offers.
Michael Dale, CTO at Caffeine.TV, added “The abstraction layer becomes yet another layer you need to manage…ultimately you end up with all these cross-plane scripts that are trying to organize all these different features.”
Cloudera Field CTO Carolyn Duby stood against the wave of multi-cloud vitriol (though she kind of had to, working for a hybrid cloud platform an all). But even she conceded multi-cloud “has to have a business purpose” rather than being deployed as “tech for tech’s sake.”
Silverlinings has chats with Red Hat and Oracle coming up, so we expect the multi-cloud debate to rage on into the new year!
Read all of our content from the Cloud Executive Summit here.